The Art Of Not Working At Work Or I Guess Talk About Jury Duty

At first, the ability to check email, read ESPN, or browse Zappos while on the job may feel like a luxury. But in time, many crave more meaningful—and more demanding—responsibilities.

This statement really spoke to me:

Having spent years as a bureaucrat at the utility Électricité de France, Maier contends that work is increasingly reduced to “make-believe,” that at the office, “image counts more than product, seduction more than production.”

Goddamned that describes my last contract perfectly. A thousand people pretending to work, attending meetings, and about 3 frustrated engineers in the middle of it going, "can we write some fucking code already?"

I hesitate to even say this, but I have never been called for jury duty. Perhaps they know I am a misanthrope and would therefore sully the jury pool because I would render a guilty verdict against anyone who inconveniences me?

That's 40 hours of pure unadulterated context switching. I don't get to be properly effective at literally ANY of those things.

Blakey, you should totally work for me. That way I can farm out writing up all the WTF's. It could literally be your full time job.

I did jury duty earlier this year. Civil traffic case. Really interesting. Jagoff Entrepreneur made a left turn into conflicting traffic and got clobbered by minimum wage laborer driving his wife's 20-year old beater. And sued over it. And dragged the case out for a decade on procedural nonsense (3 prior mistrials over presenting the jury with "irrelevant" information). There was a bunch of seemingly relevant info we as the jury weren't allowed to know even existed that I looked up post trial, and entire wads of stuff were allowed to be entered into evidence but weren't allowed to consider. Among that category was the fact that the guy was seeking medical expenses. For medical expenses that had already been paid by his insurance company (his evidence of those expenses was the insurance company's list of payments they made). I wasn't even aware you could do that (effectively getting paid twice), nevermind have the jury be legally unable to take that into account.

Fortunately we found mutual liability for the collision ("we believe both of you. Both of you were driving like idiots. THX FOR PLAYING!") and therefore the damages didn't come into play - because that would have been a friggin' nightmare. Trying to do mathematics on a panel AND argue whether a given operand should be included or not? Noooooooo thank you.

Personally, I'd appeal, because somehow they ended up with a jury of 6 made up of a race driver, a trucker, a retired woman who drives a Class A RV around the country and only maintains a nominal residence, a guy who owns a luxury car hire firm and limo service (night before the trial he was driving a celebrity's dog to NYC), a driving instructor, and a kid without a license.

I mentioned Jury Nullification the last time blakey mentioned having jury duty, and he said he likes jury duty.

I don't get the link between jury nullification and jury duty.

Or are you saying the only possible use for being aware of jury nullification is to use it to get dismissed during Voir Dire?

If I had wanted to weasel out of my civic duty, I'd have just told them I was job hunting and had to be available for interviews. My county has like a 96% jury duty reporting rate (one county in Washington State is 11%), so they're really generous about stuff like that.

As it turns out, so far this week there has been exactly one (1) jury trial in my Superior Court. So not only do we have like a 96% reporting rate, but we hardly have any crime. It's extremely likely they won't actually need me to report. But I'm still "on-call" through tomorrow at least.

I haven't been called since moving to WA, so I'm not quite sure how things work here. In CA (actually, I don't know if it was statewide, or just a county thing) in fairly recent years, they had a system that greatly reduced the inconvenience of having to spend the week sitting around the courthouse twiddling your thumbs. You had to call twice a day and listen to a recording of which jurors were supposed to report to which courthouse; if you weren't one of them, you just had to call in again later. Jurors were called in numerical order, so you could estimate how likely it was that you would have to report next time.

I've only served on a jury once, and I'd really rather not repeat that experience. It was a murder trial that lasted 6 weeks — wasted, because we deadlocked 11-1, so they had to do it all over again with another bunch of suckersfine, outstanding jurors. (Convicted him that time — life without parole, I think.) The experience did not improve my opinion of lawyers or our legal system.

Well, I can't speak for every County, just Snohomish. I wager it's way different in King or Pierce.

In Snohomish County, you have to report on Monday morning and they do like an hour of "tutorial", then you wait around because (in theory) the court fills all their jury requirements on Monday. Then you go home around noon and call in for the rest of the week, unless you got selected into a jury. I'm 99% sure they won't need me because:

The clerk told us early on that there was only one jury trial currently queued for this week, they selected for it around 9:30 AM and I wasn't selected, and:

The clerk actually took my badge from me when we were leaving for the day, so she could scan the barcodes faster, which means they don't think I'll need a badge for the rest of the week.

So basically I'm just dialing-in the phone line each evening to see if it says to report. Also in theory they could pro-actively call me, but I got the impression that only happens if not enough people reported when instructed, which isn't very likely here.

Last time I served as foreman of a harassment case. It was open-and-shut, the State had a tape recording of the most violent, hate-filled, angry, harassing voice mail message you could even imagine. We had to listen to that thing like 3 times, it was pretty unpleasant.

That doesn't sound too bad. Other than reporting in person Monday morning, that's pretty much how things worked back in Santa Clara County (heart of Silicon Valley), too, except the courts there are a lot busier, so there's a very real possibility of having to report late in the week.

Haha I was slightly nervous about maybe getting a case related to that shooting in Marysville, that would have not been pleasant. But I think it's way too early for any of those cases to be at the point of choosing jurors.

Personally, I'd appeal, because somehow they ended up with a jury of 6 made up of a race driver, a trucker, a retired woman who drives a Class A RV around the country and only maintains a nominal residence, a guy who owns a luxury car hire firm and limo service (night before the trial he was driving a celebrity's dog to NYC), a driving instructor, and a kid without a license.

The only two times I was called they brought my juror pool in for a cocaine-dealing case (first time) and two murders (second time).

The lawyers' keep/reject process is ... fascinating... to say the least.

The second time, a friend I ran into got put into the jury box for both murders, but after the lawyers got a chance to look at their entire jury, they pulled him out both times.

County. Very county. So county that my schools have their own weather closure zone and helicopter parents out here use that as some sort of social identity.

Seriously. I got ads for a (state?) senate candidate based on the premise that he had "helped preserve the tradition" of our high school's unique-ish scheduling system in the face of evil gubbmint oppression. That fucking school and "DON'T BUILD OR IMPROVE ANYTHING EVER BECAUSE I GOT MY SLICE OF CONVENIENTLY LOCATED RURAL PARADISE AND DON'T WANT THE SUBURBS TO CREEP IN" are literally the only two things going on up here.

I mean, personally, I'd like a gas station that isn't ripoff expensive and a grocery store that doesn't involve paying double or driving twenty minutes. And kids can get off my lawn.

There was a bunch of seemingly relevant info we as the jury weren't allowed to know even existed that I looked up post trial, and entire wads of stuff were allowed to be entered into evidence but weren't allowed to consider.

I hesitate to even say this, but I have never been called for jury duty.

Who knows, you may get lucky one day. The trials I've served on have been interesting and a nice break from work.

A drug-related murder case. It was obvious after the first day that they had the wrong guy and the judge dismissed the case.

A rape/carjacking case. The alleged victim testified that she asked the alleged rapist to wear a condom (he complied). The carjacking part was because after the act, he asked her to go grab his beer, which he left at the edge of the parking lot where the acts took place. He took off with her car while she was going to get the beer for him.

A domestic violence case where both sides were obviously lying. While waiting to be called for that case, the judge was looking for jurors for a DUI case. She had to call 12 candidates up to get 6 who hadn't been arrested for DUI.

A drug-related murder case. It was obvious after the first day that they had the wrong guy and the judge dismissed the case.

That's the prosecutor fucking up. They really shouldn't bring cases where the accused obviously didn't do it; it's just a waste of everyone's time and money.@antiquariansaid:

A rape/carjacking case. The alleged victim testified that she asked the alleged rapist to wear a condom (he complied). The carjacking part was because after the act, he asked her to go grab his beer, which he left at the edge of the parking lot where the acts took place. He took off with her car while she was going to get the beer for him.

That sounds bizarre, like the details you report just don't really fit with the crime. If that's how it was presented to you, unchallenged, the defence were enormously far from the best (and the prosecution on mind-bending drugs).

But juries are there to determine the guilt of the accused, nobody else.

That sounds bizarre, like the details you report just don't really fit with the crime. If that's how it was presented to you, unchallenged, the defence were enormously far from the best (and the prosecution on mind-bending drugs).

The defendant admitted to having sex with the accuser, but told the police it was consensual. It was in general a bizarre case. The accuser was homeless and living in her car, but had $700 in a coffee can with her.

We ended up acquitting on the rape charge because the matter of consent was murky at best, but convicting on the carjacking charge because he did take her car and we didn't want him to be able to just walk away from it. The judge told us after the case was over that the accuser was a prostitute (we came to that conclusion ourselves during deliberations) working from her car, but the laws wouldn't allow that evidence to be admitted.

Michigan, which is where I was living at the time, has a rape shield law. Basically, the accuser's past sexual history and current practices are considered to be irrelevant to whether the rape happened, so are not allowed to be presented in the trial.

That kind of makes sense, but it's hard to claim rape when you were paid for it.

He didn't actually pay her, and there wasn't any testimony that she wanted money from him for obvious reasons. If he was supposed to pay her and didn't, I'm not sure that counts as rape but I'm not convinced it doesn't. But we weren't allowed any of that information during the trial and may have convicted had the information been available.

Just because someone sometimes consents to sex in return for money doesn't mean that they can never subjected to a rape, or that they cannot be the attacker either. The key is whether there was consent at the time. One party regretting it afterwards doesn't make it rape either.

County. Very county. So county that my schools have their own weather closure zone and helicopter parents out here use that as some sort of social identity.

Seriously. I got ads for a (state?) senate candidate based on the premise that he had "helped preserve the tradition" of our high school's unique-ish scheduling system in the face of evil gubbmint oppression. That fucking school and "DON'T BUILD OR IMPROVE ANYTHING EVER BECAUSE I GOT MY SLICE OF CONVENIENTLY LOCATED RURAL PARADISE AND DON'T WANT THE SUBURBS TO CREEP IN" are literally the only two things going on up here.

I mean, personally, I'd like a gas station that isn't ripoff expensive and a grocery store that doesn't involve paying double or driving twenty minutes. And kids can get off my lawn.

Bah. I drove my adorable little rear wheel drive sports car to work every day last winter.

Past luxury SUVs and pickup trucks in snow banks.

That one morning with 8 inches of snow on the road was hilarious. I actually got a wave from a loader operator who was desperately trying to keep drifts down (and failing).

Snow tires make all the difference.

Indeed. For my RWD sports sedan, when I lived in New England, I had some nice rims with sticky summer tires, and put winter tires on my stock rims. Swapped them out, had great success over the 35 mile commute.

Among that category was the fact that the guy was seeking medical expenses. For medical expenses that had already been paid by his insurance company (his evidence of those expenses was the insurance company's list of payments they made). I wasn't even aware you could do that (effectively getting paid twice),

My understanding is that you can do that. But the insurance company is going to get it.